Quotes by Benedetto Croce

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The poet is formed in the double and yet unique movement of finding out his connections with the tradition of poetry, resuming, with his own voice, the eternal motive that poetry seeks, and to search and discover his own originality, his own personality, his own mission, making his own voice ring out with purity.

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If art is beyond morality, the artist, since he is a man, who cannot evade his human duties, is neither beyond nor beyond, but, under its empire, and art itself must consider it as a mission, must exercise it as a priesthood.

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The joy with which anyone receives a poem would be his own work and his own creation that what creates poetry is not the individual as such, but the genius of humanity, which exists in all of us.

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The act that must be performed in order to feel is an act of internalization, without which the poem, the sounds with which it expressed itself, rings hollow.

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What I dislike in so-called "realistic" poetry is the immediate and raw impressions of reality, untuned and unmelted into a poetic motif... And what I dislike in so-called "idealistic" poetry is the lack of connection with passion, a replaced connection with conventional schemes; ...

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That is why, as a remedy for one and the other, there is the requirement of an image, material and at the same time aerial, which is of the whole and true poetry...

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Those who absolutize one or the other of these one-sided tendencies are usually intellectuals, as the romantics were, or very soon became.

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Nothing else can be said about the beautiful that is truly beautiful. In front of him, the one who understands the art, the one who is very good at these things, not only freezes, but also silences.

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Poetry...is...an integral part of human history, which would be mutilated and incompressible without its poets.

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The poet is... nothing but his poetry itself: a non-paradoxical statement, if we consider that neither the philosopher is anything but his philosophy, nor the statesman anything but his political action and creation...

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Poets are ethereal beings, living not in an overworld, but in our world, living and creative beings of pure humanity, from whom the sweetness of relief is demanded and obtained.

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Poetry does not deal with "problems", it creates pictures of life, in the act.

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An aspiration enclosed in a representation, that is what art means.

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Poetry is the language of feeling, prose of the intellect: but since the intellect, in its concrete existence and in its reality, is also feeling, any prose also has a side of poetry.

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This statement should not be seen as a dogma, claiming the writers' unconditional adherence to the prevailing guidelines of the time...

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In judging works of art, we must take into account a number of individual factors (temperamental predispositions, spiritual formation, artistic conceptions, etc.) which, in the last resort, define the originality of the artist, evident in the field of expression, understood as a dialectical unity of content and form ...

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The content of a work of art is, in fact, made up of the totality of the reactions of a consciousness in front of reality - objective or subjective - and the theoretical motivations of these reactions...

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Every genuine work of art is the repository of a unique and irreducible spiritual experience.

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Through their very creative act, the world's great artists have manifested their belief in the reality of good and the value of existence...

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Any true work of art was a factor in the progress of its age and continues to be so, if understood both in its permanent meanings and in its historicity.

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The national specificity is a guarantee of the authenticity of the work of art, which is not built on sand, but sinks its roots as deeply as possible into a life-giving earth...

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Poetic matter is in everyone's soul, only the expression, i.e. the form, makes the poet.

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Poetry is the mother tongue of mankind; the first men were by nature sublime poets.

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The great writers and artists of the world never remained strangers to the aspirations of their age... Viable works are the creations of artists who filled their souls with the ideas of their age...